Currently, there is no direct association between commercial aircraft voice communication channels and the location information presented to air traffic controllers or other pilots. This is currently done by air traffic controllers and pilots stating the aircraft flight ID (call sign) during exchanges of information; however, there is currently no positive identification of the aircraft on an air traffic controller's display(s) (or pilot display(s)) while the communication is taking place in real time.
An additional problem with existing automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) signal communication systems is that software-defined radios can be used to generate ADS-B signals of spoofed (e.g., non-existent) aircraft, which can cause safety concerns, delays, and confusion for air traffic control and aircraft. Currently, ADS-B broadcasts can be tracked and displayed via internet to show flights in progress broadcasting ADS-B messages. Currently, ADS-B broadcasts may be heard by multiple receivers at receiving base stations. Such ADS-B broadcasts are typically separated by unique Aircraft transponder address fields in the message data; however, while the messages include cyclic coding for parity checks, no encryption or PN (Pseudo-Noise) spreading is applied to the ADS-B broadcasts. Because there is no encryption used for the broadcasts, it is simple to receive/decode and encode/transmit real or fake messages. As a further security risk, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Aircraft Registration Master file is freely available to the public from the FAA website. This database is updated weekly and provides detailed information about aircraft including the unique registration numbers and Mode-S Transponder Codes. This information can be used by casual observers to populate aircraft location maps and track specific aircraft of interest. Unfortunately, this information could also be used by malicious users to transmit fake signals from “ghost planes” using real identifiers.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method, apparatus, and system configured to improve identification of the source of emitted signals.